Help that Hinders? Exploring the ways donors shape local community participation in environmental NGO projects.

In this thesis I investigate the impact of donor organizations on NGOs’ efforts to foster local community participation in environmental projects, by analyzing how conditions on project funding affect a sample of South African NGOs. Numerous NGOs take environmental justice as a key tenet of their work. Yet, promoting environmental justice is not an easy task to perform. Aside from cultural, political and social contingencies peculiar to specific contexts, there are external constraints that can help or hinder NGOs’ efforts, among which resource-dependency dynamics stand out as particularly relevant. In fact, donors hold power over NGOs, who must stick to specific conditions to secure their support. My aim is to understand what conditions and what type of donors facilitate or hinder community participation —a basic condition for achieving environmental justice— in environmental projects, where hindrances are exemplified by the presence of NGOization dynamics. I analyze donors’ guiding principles, eligibility criteria and monitoring and evaluation standards, delving into the provisions of five different funders that financially support local environmental projects in South Africa, classified according to their core values and organizational settings. Data are collected, coded, and analyzed with the help of NVIVO through a content analysis of calls for grants, project proposals, project reports, and semi-structured interviews to donors and NGO professionals. In this study, I argue that donor organizations can facilitate community participation and avoid NGOization dynamics by acknowledging the existence of unequal power relations between them and the NGOs they fund and by taking measures to respond to NGOs demands. This study highlights the importance of long-term engagement and a relationship based on trust between donors and NGOs as key to creating alternative funding models that help secure the goals that local communities define. Moreover, this study also claims that donors’ upward accountability has a weight in determining conditions on funds and eligibility criteria, and that many of the donors’ virtuous practices originate from their independence from upward accountability measures.